Technology ‘intermediaries’ may be asked to store User Data

The government is moving to formulate rules that will require innovation/technology ‘intermediaries’— including email administrations like Gmail, Chat applications, for example, WhatsApp and Snapchat or even ecommerce firms like Amazon — to hold client data, an advancement that is relied upon to be met with decided restriction.

The council is headed by additional secretary in the ministry of electronics and IT (MEITY), Ajay Kumar, and has one agent each from the service of home affairs, Department of telecom, Nasscom, department of personnel and training, Internet Service Provider Association of India (ISPAI).Alongside Advocate who specializes in digital law and a couple officers from MEITY will also be part of the Committee. The initial meeting of the board of trustees occurred in first week of September.

With help of this committee government is now hoping to draft rules for Section 67C of the Information Technology Act, and this will be defined by a board of trustees/committee that has been set up for this reason. The standards — whose drafting has been holding up since 2008 — will illuminate what kind of information must be stored, in which format, and the duration, as indicated by 3 members from the recently shaped board of trustees. This so that law-implementation organizations can get to the data in the event if they require it.

Sharing of data between foreign firms and the Indian government has been a combative issue, and specialists said the order might be difficult to actualize for firms, for example, WhatsApp that guarantee end-to-end encryption. On the other hand for Snapchat – a talk application where messages vanish inside seconds and are not even stored in the organization’s servers.

Section 67C alludes to the obligation of the administration suppliers to hold data, but the nature of the information to be held and the time period is not indicated. Organizations which don’t obey the law can be imposed fine and its officers can be imprisoned. Though the committee members said the whole procedure is time taking and will require more rounds of consultation.